ASEAN CHARTER.......tentative steps towards ASEAN UNION?

"...short of a Military Intervention,

there will NOT be a regime change in Myanmar"

~ anonymous ~

Yesterday, I attended a talk by Tan Sri Ahmad Fuzi(ambassador at large) on " ASEAN Charter: Moving Forward" organised by Asia-Europe Institute (AEI) as part of their Ambassadors Lecture. Kudos to the speaker as he managed to elucidate the ASEAN mechanisms and brought me up to speed in less than an hour what my friends doing the International Masters in ASEAN Studies(IMAS) takes hours to learn.

Matters that piqued me:-

• ASEAN Charter have "come to force" i.e. ratified in December 2008.


• USA was the first country to appoint an ambassador to ASEAN. However, the Japanese ambassador(Masahiko Horie) pointed out that Japan had appointed a "dedicated ambasador" to ASEAN back in October...unlike the US ambassador who is in lieu of another word "multi-tasking".


• Secretariat of ASEAN have an operating budget of just USD 10 million annually.


• ASEAN have more than 700 meetings yearly... However, this pales in comparison to the European Union who conducts hundreds of meetings monthly.

PS: I first met H.E. Masahiko Horie in February 2008 in Cyberjaya during the launch of DreamEDGE Malaysia and found him to be a very affable, approachable and hardworking ambassador. I believe it's a matter of time before his promotion as his services would be required elsewhere.